There aren’t many films from the first half of the 20th century that depict the career working woman, but they existed in real life, many of them, and Vera Caspary was one.

Born in Chicago in 1899, she put herself through business school, worked in advertising and journalism and became a novelist and a playwright, fully supporting her mother with her writing by the time she was 25 years old. No wonder she writes so eloquently about independent career women in her novel “Laura” and in her film treatment for “The Blue Gardenia,” which were turned into two of the best noirs of all-time.

Caspary was one of several female pulp fiction writers who churned out genre stories (under their own names as well as nom de plumes), a list that includes Dorothy B. Hughes, Patricia Highsmith, Charlotte Armstrong, Elizabeth Sanxay Holding and Dolores Hitchens. The films those writers inspired are part of a terrific new film series at the Berkeley Art Museum’s Pacific Film Archive, “Band of Outsiders: Women Crime Writers.”

The first weekend includes a double feature of Highsmith adaptations on Saturday, July 1 — Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train” (5:30 p.m.) and Rene Clement’s “Purple Noon” (8:15 p.m.), a 1960 take on her novel “The Talented Mr. Ripley.”

Series curators Kathy Geritz and Judy Bloch were inspired by a pair of recent book projects edited by Sarah Weinman, the two-volume set “Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & ’50s” and an anthology of short crime fiction, “Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense.” Co-sponsored by the Bay Area Book Festival, the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive will have both volumes of “Women Crime Writers” on sale. (Weinman’s website companion to “Women Crime Writers” at http://womencrime.loa.org is an excellent resource.)

There is an elephant in the room with these 15 mostly excellent films: They are all directed by men. How much of the original author’s intent made it to the screen? Caspary once famously ran into “Laura” director Otto Preminger at the Stork Club in New York and preceded to loudly berate him about his adaptation of her novel, and how the character of Laura Hunt was not as independent and career-minded as her vision.

Nevertheless, in “Laura” (July 21), Gene Tierney’s Laura Hunt is a smart, confident career woman who knows who she is. It is the men in her life — columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) and gigolo Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price) — who have an idealized view of Laura, as symbolized by the painting of Laura that hangs in her apartment, that aligns with their own fetishes and reflects their own fantasies. Thus, she is constantly confounding their expectations of her.

Caspary is also represented by Fritz Lang’s “The Blue Gardenia” (7 p.m. Wednesday, July 5), in which Anne Baxter, one of three career women who share an apartment (with Ann Sothern and Jeff Donnell), is date-raped by Raymond Burr and becomes the prime suspect in his murder. Inspired originally by Caspary’s all-female cast play “Blind Mice,” which she turned into a 130-page film treatment, it is definitely a movie with a feminist slant — unlike the rarely screened minor-but-interesting British adaptation of Caspary’s “Bedelia” (July 21), which stars Margaret Lockwood as a country wife with a murderous past.

The issue of honoring the original author’s intent comes to the fore in three adaptations of Hughes, one of the best and most adventuresome writers in the series. Her “Ride the Pink Horse” was adapted, excellently and mostly faithfully, by director and star Robert Montgomery, and as a 1964 TV movie directed by Don Siegel and starring Robert Culp (both screen Aug. 4).

But “In a Lonely Place” (Aug. 11) is something yet again. As directed by Nicholas Ray, it stars Humphrey Bogart as Dixon Steele, a Hollywood screenwriter with an anger management problem who is accused of murder. He becomes involved with a neighbor and potential witness, Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame). It is one of the great noirs, and yet ...

Hughes’ book is something else. In her creation, Dixon Steele is a war veteran and woman-hating serial killer, and Laurel Gray is an actress (we don’t know what she does for a living in the movie) who becomes ensnared in an abusive relationship with Dixon and begins to suspect that he is a dangerous criminal. But Hughes audaciously chooses to tell the story not through Laurel’s viewpoint but Dixon’s. Perhaps her intent was to, in a hyper-stylized way, suggest the misogyny that 1940s post-war women faced.

But the one constant is the strength, resourcefulness and maturity of Laurel Gray. In the film, in a great performance by Graham that must have pleased Hughes, she is the stronger character. And when your co-star is Bogart, that’s quite a feat indeed.